


Love, Stan

by eddieo-spaghettio (ElsieMcClay)



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, It doesn't Exist fam, Love Simon AU, M/M, Outing, Stanlon - Freeform, moose is more of a bitch than henry tbh, neither does the losers club for the most part?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-29 12:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20082562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElsieMcClay/pseuds/eddieo-spaghettio
Summary: It started with a FaceTime call, a blog post, and a secret that only Stan knew.





	Love, Stan

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this for the it reverse big bang 2019! my writing partner was reddie-for-anything (emily was amazing and put up with my nagging for MONTHS shes,,, wow i have to thank her she was amazing) and our artist was unlikelysnitchcollective!! 
> 
> check out the it reverse big bang page on tumblr as well as emily's piece later on in the month and our artist's creation
> 
> i was so lucky to have been a part of this (even tho i was Mega Stressed the moment july hit because i wasnt close to done and really wanted to be...its okay i made it) and i got to interact with so many amazing people in the process!! theyre all super cool

As with most things ending in embarrassment, this whole ordeal started with a secret. A very big, very secret secret. This secret was the sort of thing no one knew about, not Stan’s closest friends, not his parents, not even the journal he tried to keep in ninth grade. He hadn’t even told his cat, and that was saying something because he told his cat everything. 

Stanley Uris was gay. He had his first crush on Bill Denbrough in the eighth grade, and he never told anyone. As far as anyone in Derry was concerned, Stan was entirely normal—entirely _ heterosexual _just like all the other boys in their grade. All the other boys, excluding, maybe, Timothy Slater. Everybody called him gay because he liked to wear the color pink and had different colored nails each week. Stan thought his nails looked pretty nice, but he’d never say a thing like that to Timothy. And why was pink such a bad color, anyway?

Yes, as far as Derry was concerned, Stan liked women. He lived an entirely mundane life—a beige house in the cul-de-sac with little, yellow tulips in the front garden and a white picket fence. His father was a rabbi, his mother the PTA-stay-at-home sort of mother who liked to gossip with the neighbors over the fence and drank arguably a little too much kosher wine. He was an only child, but he had long since stopped wishing for a sibling. He had a few friends—not too many, but enough to not feel so alone in the suffocating hallways of Derry High—and he drank an almost unhealthy amount of shitty herbal tea from the little drive-through coffee shop downtown. 

With a life like that, how could anyone be gay? Well, Stan was. He was a raging homosexual; he knew it in the way his normally-steady hands shook when Bill helped him pick up his books after he dropped them all over the hallway on the first day of classes and how he felt the strange need to avert his eyes in the locker room when the other boys were changing, just in case someone caught his eye and pointed at him and laughed. He knew it in the way he didn’t like to look at the stupid magazines Richie bragged about having stuffed under his mattress but was too scared to complain about them in case it outed him. 

“Ew, Richie,” Eddie complained, crossing his arms over his chest, and Stan wished he could have been that brave, “we don’t wanna hear about that shit. It’s gross.” 

“Sorry, Eds.” But Richie was grinning and didn’t sound sorry at all, and that was that, but Stan was still too scared to say anything the next time he brought up his stupid magazines. 

Stan liked to think he was smart. Not anything arrogant—he was no genius—but maybe, if he was being generous, a little above the average intelligence of Derry, which, now that he thought about it, wasn’t all too hard to surpass. There were people like Richie, stupidly smart, and then there were people like Henry Bowers, Belch, Greta, and Moose who dropped the bar just a little. 

But sometimes, things happened to Stan that made him wonder if he was dumber than he thought or just an unlucky son of a bitch. The way this secret got out was one of these things, and it began with a FaceTime call with the one and only Beverly Marsh, an email, and a blog post. 

“So,” Bev started over the doomed FaceTime call, and Stan hummed but paid her no more mind than he had been for the rest of the call. He had chemistry homework, and the little, tiny drawings of molecules were just starting to make sense without Richie there to explain it to him with every new question on the page. 

“So?” he murmured when she didn’t continue right away. 

“Did you read that new post on DerryBlog?”

“You’re obsessed with that damn blog, Bev. I have better things to do than read about some people I don’t care for. Like this—hey, do you remember what she said about the, uh—”

“Well, apparently there’s some closeted gay kid at school. And before you ask, it’s not Timothy Slater. It’s someone else.” Stan paused, breath caught in his throat. He choked on his spit and coughed, mumbling a feeble excuse and hanging up on Bev. He cut her off in the middle of her good-bye, but he didn’t care—at least, not much, not with this new, potentially life-ruining news. He was a closeted gay kid at school…_ shit _. 

Stan lunged for his open laptop where it rested on his desk. He clicked off the blank Google tab he had open, typing fast. The URL was riddled with so many mistakes he had to retype it in the search bar. His fingers shook because it couldn’t be him, it couldn’t be. Stan didn’t know what he would do if he saw his name or his picture there on the blog dedicated to news around Derry, the word Gay! written beneath his school picture. No, he didn’t know what he would do.

The page loaded far too slowly for Stan’s poor heart. He wasn’t sure if he was breathing or not. The little circle in the left corner of his computer screen swirled and swirled around and around, and Stan’s eyes followed it until the page loaded, and he grew dizzy. The page loaded, and his eyes scanned fast over the words and the column of profile pictures and comments, anything that might tell him it was, in fact, about him before he had to read the post for himself:

_ BigBelch _: fucking loser!

_ b.marsh.ev liked this post! _

_ gretagretagreta _: i hate this town. is anyone straight anymore? 

_ Rich-The-Man replied to gretagretagreta’s comment _: no one cares, greta. 

Stan rolled his eyes at Greta’s comment. He was sure he had seen her not two days ago, half snogging some boy in the hall. She surely was straight, but Stan wasn’t so sure about that boy—she might’ve ruined women for him with all that…tongue. He scrolled for a little longer, but he didn’t see his name, and the little inbox icon on the bottom of his screen stayed blissfully devoid of any message notifications. 

Finally, he worked up the nerve to read the short message from the mystery kid. 

_ There’s something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for a while now, but I’ve been scared to do it. Scared of everyone’s reaction, scared of myself, scared of my parents. Scared of everything, I think. But I’m tired of being scared and I’m tired of lying and feeling guilty. If anyone here knows me – and trust me you do – then you would know I don’t like keeping secrets. But I’ve been keeping a very big one for a very long time. I don’t want to keep it, anymore. I feel so caged and alone and tired and I just want to let go of that. So here it goes, I guess. _

_ I’m gay. _

_ Love, Lawrence _

Huh. Maybe the boys in his grade were not as straight as Stan originally thought. He took a deep breath and read the post again and again…and again. The words, the little pixel words, all blurred together into little, black lines on a stark-white background.

It wasn’t him. It _ wasn’t him. It wasn’t him _ . Stan wasn’t the closeted gay kid at school. Sure, he was a closeted gay kid at school, but he wasn’t _ the _ closeted gay kid at school. He let out a breath and leaned back in his desk chair and ran his hands down his face. 

He was safely inside the closet for another day. He thought he was quite comfortable firmly inside the closet where it was safe and warm and…secret. But, all the same, for the first time in a long, long time, he wanted to tell someone. He wanted someone other than himself to know about it. Stan wondered what it felt like for Lawrence now that someone other than himself knew. Was he free? Was he a secret lighter? Did he feel the same as he did before the post? Some dark part of Stan wanted that, however it felt. 

Take a step. Open the doors, let some light in, why don’t you? 

_ I don’t because I can’t take the step back, can’t close the door, can’t bring the dark back. _

Coming out was irreversible. And, in Derry, it was a different kind of social suicide. It was having to be a misfit in a whole society of misfits. 

In a split-second decision, the sort of split-second decision that took multiple split seconds to carry out, he made himself a new email, signed in, and he hovered, for a moment, over the blue text of the email. He swallowed hard, scooted to the edge of his desk chair, and clicked. Another tab opened on his browser: _ Inbox - l0nelyb0y@gmail.com _

_ Dear Lawrence, _

_ I’m just like you. You’re just like me? We’re like each other, I guess. _

_ I read your post on DerryBlog, and…I’m gay. I’m gay, too, I mean. Shit, that’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud. (Or, not really out loud because this is an email, but you get what I’m saying, don’t you?) But I’m just like you—my life is almost annoyingly normal. My parents are happy, I guess, and we live in a cul-de-sac, and I go to high school every day, and I come home and struggle with my homework every night. _

_ My friends and I do normal high school things. We sit around and dream about college and getting the Hell out of Derry. I’ve known the three of them my whole life, and they think they know me, but I haven’t even told them. Is that terrible of me? That I’m telling some stranger I don’t even know the real name of (I don’t think, but maybe Lawrence is your real name?) before I tell my friends? I think it might be… _

_ But like I said. I’m just like you. I live a normal life—or, as normal as life in Derry can be—except I’m not as straight as most people think I probably am. _

_ Sincerely, _

Stan stared at the blinking cursor for a long time. Saying his name was Stan would give him away, but he wasn’t exactly sure what other name to give to this stranger. He leaned back in his chair and ran a hand down his face, blowing out a long breath. He opened his eyes, and his gaze caught on a picture hung on his wall behind his desk, him and his parents on vacation that time they went up to Canada to ski. 

_ Sincerely, _

_ Sullivan _

Stan had had an…an _ infatuation _with a boy named Sullivan during his vacation with his family, and he thought it only fitting to call himself that for this…this—what was this? This step out of the safety of his closet, perhaps, or this momentary weakness where it all got too heavy, and the prospect of lessening that weight was just too good to pass up. He didn’t know. 

Stan hit the blue “send” button before he could drag his cursor over all the text and delete it, and the email draft box shrunk into a smaller, gray box: “Email sent!” He closed his laptop so hard it was a wonder, really, the screen didn’t crack. He blew out a breath and stood and paced back and forth across his room once, twice, and he sat back down. He opened his computer, eyes drifting immediately to the blank inbox. 

What did he expect? For the stranger to reply immediately, if at all? A stupid thought, he realized. He would be lucky if the stranger ever even read the email—he’d be lucky if the stranger was what he said he was in his post. 

Perhaps the ordeal didn’t quite begin with the secret, not at first; maybe it began when the secret between one became a secret between two. 

Stanley Uris was gay. He had never told anyone, not even his cat, but he had just come out to a complete and total stranger. Yes, sometimes he wondered if he really was dropping the bar of Derry’s average intelligence right alongside Bowers, Belch, Moose, and Greta. Stan closed his laptop again, stood from his chair, and he decided he would take his parents up on their earlier offer for a movie night with them—“We can watch Disney or one of those weird rom-coms your mother seems to like,” his father had said, but Stan had declined: “Chemistry.” 

Yeah, well, to Hell with chemistry. He’d just bribe Richie to do it for him in second period. When would he ever need to know about covalent bonds and ionic bonds, anyway? He might have potentially ruined his life with the click of one button (technically, the click of many buttons since he had to, you know, type the email, then send it, but he was choosing to disregard that). Stan thought he deserved to spend a night between his parents on their couch, pretending to gag each time the people on screen kissed—Stan knew his father would cave and put on one of his mother’s movies. 

“I’m a weak man, Stanley,” he told Stan once as she swept out of the kitchen after he’d promised to give up his Saturday to do a list of chores for her. Stan gagged then, too, and complained about his breakfast not tasting quite so good coming back up. His father laughed, then, and Stan smiled down at his plate of eggs (scrambled) with barely toasted bread on the side. 

For a long time, he wondered if he would have the same sort of family he did now when he was older. Would he find someone to marry? Would they want kids? Would his husband love him? Would his parents still love him? For a long time, his nails were bitten down to the nail beds, and he closed himself in his room for hours at a time until, finally, he resolved to put his future out of his mind until it _ was _his future. That was that, for the most part. 

Of course, he still had nights where he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking—worrying—about it some more. For now, he put the email out of his mind, his future and fate out of his mind, and he watched Drew Barrymore forget about Adam Sandler. 

He had to admit, he didn’t blame her. Drew Barrymore could do so much better than Adam Sandler and his stupid boat. 

* * * *

The next day, Stan’s back ached for how he fell asleep on the couch to the end credits of _ Love, Actually _. Who would have thought Andrea Uris liked the strange, though (Stan had to admit) oddly interesting subgenre of movie: 2000’s Romantic Comedies. Surely not him, but he had been around her his whole life, so he knew, by now, about his mother’s almost impressive, verging on embarrassing, DVD collection. 

He was too big, now, for his parents to carry him to bed, so his father put a blanket over him, turned off the television, and headed to bed himself. Perhaps being curled up on the sofa too small for his teenage limbs was not the best idea for his knees or other joints—shit, he sounded old when he said that, he could almost hear Richie making fun of him in the back of his head. 

Stan stood minutes after waking when his hip’s throbbing and back’s aching got to be too much, and he stretched his hands over his head. Bones popped and crackled, and his shirt rose up above his jeans (“Seriously, Stan, only five-year-olds and sad, middle-aged people fall asleep in jeans and wake up with achy bones,” said Richie’s annoying voice). He tugged it back down and took the steps by twos to his bedroom, propelling himself up with a hand on the railing. 

For a blissful half-an-hour, Stan forgot about the email and the post. He brushed his teeth and made faces at himself in the mirror. He dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, no different from any day, and he sat at his desk and scrolled through his phone for a long time. His chemistry book laid, closed, next to his laptop, so he avoided looking at that and, instead, opened the laptop to check for more notifications before school. 

The first page to load was the new email. His stomach dropped, and he remembered what he did like a punch to the stomach. Stan froze, his eyes caught on the new email handle on the tab, but he drifted down the page. 

_ Inbox - 1 new E-Mail! _

Again, Stan froze, his mouth hanging open comically. 

“Shit,” he breathed, the syllable slipping out between his lips before he knew what he was saying. He leaned forward, ribs pressing uncomfortably into the edge of his desk, and he scrambled to click the new email. 

_ Sullivan,  _

_ Wow, another gay kid. I kind of can’t believe it. I’ve felt so alone this whole time but I guess I’m not. Neither of us are.  _

_ I don’t think you’re terrible for not telling them. My friends don’t know, either. I haven’t known them as long but it’s still scary. I don’t think they’ll reject me but I can’t stand the thought of losing them.  _

_ I guess we’re one in the same. Both normal. Both gay. Both maybe a little bit afraid of both of those things? Also, no, Lawrence isn’t my real name lol. But hey, it could be if you want it to be, “Sullivan.” Thanks for telling me. Your secret is safe with me. _

_ Love, Lawrence  _

Stan read over Lawrence’s response twice. Just like the time he read the post, he wasn’t sure if he was breathing, his chest tight and static-y with nerves. 

He smiled to himself and opened a new email box and began typing without the hesitation he held when he wrote his first email. He didn’t know this person, not at all, but he let the words and letters pour from his fingers through his keyboard. His cheeks ached from smiling for so long, but for the first time in a long, long time, his chest felt light and airy and not at all like his soul was weighed down by the monumental secret he was keeping from every single person in his life. For the first time in a long, long time, Stan felt like he had someone in his corner—someone really and truly by his side. 

Perhaps that was strange. As he said, he hardly knew this person, but at the same time, the stranger almost knew Stan better than Stan’s friends knew Stan. 

“Stanley!” Andrea sang from the bottom of the stairs. “You might want to get going for school. Don’t want to be late, do you?” 

“Yeah, Mom. I’m coming!” He sent the second email and closed the laptop again. He leaned over his bed, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and thundered down the stairs. “Bye! Love you!” he called, and he closed the door on his mother’s muffled reply. He pressed the button to unlock his mother’s old car, which she had given to him when she figured she didn’t have many places to go anymore. He was the only one with a car out of him and his three friends—other than Richie’s truck, which smelled of weed from the nights he and Bev grew restless and took it for a spin, and both Eddie and Stan outright refused to show up to school in the Musty Mobile as they had so fittingly named it. 

“Stanny Boy!” Richie crooned. He clambered over the backseat and tucked his ratty backpack between his legs. Stan smiled despite himself. “I had the weirdest dream last night, you know, and I really think it’s some sort of premonition for the rest of this year.” Stan glanced into the rearview mirror and shifted into reverse as Richie spoke. 

“You’re really whipping out the big words, Rich,” Bev laughed as she ducked into the passengers’ side door not halfway through Richie’s proclamation of having the third eye. “I mean, come on? Premonition?” Richie flipped her off, and she stuck out her tongue, and Stan laughed to himself. “But, go on. I wanna hear all about your premonition. Finally, someone gifts you with sight!” 

“Oh, go to Hell, Beverly,” Richie chuckled. He rolled his eyes, and Bev leaned over the middle console to flick the frame of his thick glasses. Stan drove across town, next, to Eddie’s house. The whole time, Bev and Richie bickered about nothing until Stan turned up the music on the radio. 

Richie draped an arm over Eddie’s shoulders, grinning and lolling his head onto Eddie’s shoulder. “Eddie wants to hear about my dream, don’cha, Eds?” 

“No, I’ll pass,” Eddie muttered as he fell into his seat. “And don’t call me that.” 

“Oh, come on, don’t be like that!” Eddie rolled his eyes with a smile, and Bev and Richie bickered over the middle console until Stan pulled into school. 

“Here we go, Losers,” Bev sighed. Stan pulled his keys out of the ignition. “Another day in Hell.” 

“I’ve got a test in French first period,” Richie complained. “Totally forgot about it. Didn’t study.” 

“Yeah, and your perfect four-point-oh is going to suffer because of one measly French quiz, right, Rich?” Eddie jested. Richie rolled his eyes and threw an arm over Eddie’s shoulder. 

Stan walked the hallways with a newfound curiosity. It had been a long time since he wondered about what was going on in the heads of his peers, but, now, he found himself staring at every face he passed. Well, the guys, at least. 

It could be Louis Blevins. I’ve never seen him so much as look at a girl…or maybe Norman York. Or him—what was his name again? There was Tanner Horne and Derek Pratt. Maybe it was Timothy Slater after all…_ What if it was Bowers _? 

Stan stopped himself at the last thought. If it was Bowers, he thought he’d just drop right out of school, diploma be damned. Wasn’t it the new “Millennial Trend” to not get a diploma? Yeah, he was pretty sure he read an article on that…he could jump aboard that trend pretty easily, right? 

But as Stan passed Bowers where he had a freshman trapped against the lockers, Bowers and his friends jeered at the freshman, Bowers hit his hands against the metal locker with a bang, and Stan averted his eyes. He thought he could safely eliminate Bowers from his long, long list of possibilities. 

Each face in the hallway was another possibility. Stan spent all of first period—the most boring history class he ever had the misfortune of taking—scratching a list of all the boys he could think of into a middle page of his notebook. The list was long, but he scratched out names as he thought of all the reasons it couldn’t be this boy or that boy. 

At the end of the period, the list was smaller but still almost entirely unmanageable, but Stan took solace in the fact that someone out there in those hallways knew, not just him. For some reason he couldn’t explain to himself, let alone anyone else, Stan was happier than he had been in a long, long time. He even asked Richie to do his chemistry homework with a smile on his face, to which Richie said nothing but sent him a wide-eyed look like the world was about to end. 

But, as things tend to do, shit hit the fan, and shit hit the fan hard. 

“I’d like a date,” a boy named Moose hummed two months later, just a week and a half before Halloween. Dead leaves rattled on the edges of the streets with each gust of autumn wind. 

Stan’s list was much, much smaller, now. Lawrence and Stan had grown close, though they still mostly avoided talking about who they were, really. Stan knew he lived a little outside town, had a job that required a lot of work and time, and he loved his dog more than anything else. Things were good, and Stan was happy. That was until Moose trapped him in an empty art room during their lunch period. Now, Stan was just nervous. 

Moose picked a loose string from Stan’s shirt. Stan stepped away from his fingers, backing himself into the desk.

“What? No, I—” 

“Not with you, damn. I’m not—” Moose sighed and cut himself off. “With Beverly. The little hottie you’re friends with, you know. I want a date with _ her _.” Now, Stan bristled. Of course he wasn’t going to set Bev up with an asshole like Moose, the same kid that used to throw rocks at the front wheels of their bikes when they were in ninth grade (until Eddie broke his arm and his mother threatened Moose with one of her pudgy fingers waving about in his face). He was an ass, and Bev had been through enough with asshole men. 

“No,” Stan repeated. “No, I won’t. Why would you—”

“Why would I think you would agree? Well, Stanley, I have something that might change your mind. Just a little, you know?” Moose’s hand moved to his back pocket, and Stan gripped the edge of the desk so hard the skin on his knuckles turned a ghostly white. His lungs were suddenly empty, and his stomach dropped like a stone. 

Moose pulled a thick, folded square of paper from his jeans and unfolded them slowly, so slowly Stan’s insides tumbled over themselves, and his mind went blank with panic.

“You see, I was doing some, uh, research in the computer lab the other day, but I saw one of the computers was idle. Now, I’m not one to turn down an opportunity, so I opened the screen, and guess what I found?” 

Stan took the unfolded papers from Moose’s hand, “The emails,” he breathed. The backs of his eyes prickled and burned, and his breathing wavered. 

“It was just pure luck it was yours. Pure luck you had them pulled up, too. If you had closed them, I wouldn’t have snooped, but you didn’t, so we’re here.” Moose grinned, but the grin was more him baring his teeth at Stan than a real, actual grin or smile. “So, unless you want these emails between you and your gay little penpal leaked to the whole school, get me a date with Beverly. Unless, of course, you wanted out of the closet because in that case—”

“No!” Stan interrupted. “Please, don’t leak them. I’ll—I’ll do it.” He grew quieter with every word. He clutched the papers so tightly in his hand that the paper wrinkled and bent around his fingers. 

“Trust me, I’ve got a few copies of those, too, and pictures. You break your end, and everyone will know about you. Everyone.” 

He was playing with the Devil, here, he knew. There was no way to know Moose wouldn’t leak his secret everywhere despite their promise, but…

Stan was scared. He went home and locked his door despite the no-locked-doors rule his parents set into place when he was younger and moodier and more prone to fits of slamming and locking doors, and he cried. This was the sort of cry that was empty and silent and heavy. Lonely, too, and Stan wished he could tell someone. 

_ You can. _

In a flurry of movement, the first time he had moved since he got home from school, he opened his laptop and opened the box for a new email. He cried the whole time he typed, but his fingers flew across the keyboard, and the words appeared in jumbled, misspelled lines with little, red squiggles beneath them. 

He didn’t talk about the deal with Moose. He didn’t know if Lawrence would reply if he knew someone other than Stan and himself knew about the emails. Stan didn’t know what he would do if the only person he had ever confided in suddenly left him without a trace. Stan would never know who his penpal really was. He wouldn’t have a name or a face to the emails. 

He’d be completely alone again. 

_ Dear Lawrence, _

_ I’ve never told anyone I’m gay except for you. I’ve always been too scared, and the closet is pretty cozy, isn’t it? Maybe one day, but for now, I am still terrified beyond words. What will my parents think? What will my friends think? How much harder will life in Derry become? I’ve already got people on my ass (Bowers and Moose, I’m sure you know of them if you go to Derry High), but I can’t imagine… _

_ Sometimes, I wonder if I will ever be brave enough to take that first step. Sometimes, I’m scared I’ll end up in one of those horror stories, the ones where the gay man marries a woman to please everyone else, but, secretly, he has a man on the side. I don’t want that to be me, Lawrence. If that’s what my life has to offer, my future is bleak, and I hate it. _

_ Sorry for the sudden…whatever this was. I needed to get it off my chest, and seeing as I’ve never told anyone except for you, my options were limited. Feel free to ignore this email completely. I wouldn’t blame you, not in the slightest. I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t even read this far. _

_ Sincerely, _

_ Sullivan _

Stan wiped his face on the back of his sleeve, sniffled, and sent the email.

He couldn’t even remember when he had been so careless as to use his email on a school computer. He had his phone, and he didn’t usually think the emails were so urgent that he had to reply immediately upon receiving them. And to not log out of the email? So stupid. 

He liked to think he and Lawrence were close. Close-ish, maybe. After that first time, they talked less about, you know, being gay and more about life in general. Of course, being gay was, in fact, a part of “life in general” but conversations between them about being gay were based around why neither of them had come out. Lawrence told Stan, once, that he was already an outcast—why was he so scared if there was no lower rung on the social ladder? This wouldn’t do much to his standing, he said, and Stan thought the situation was much the same for him. 

The two of them agreed not to share real names, not unless something happened (“something happening” was code for coming out, and Stan seriously doubted, because of this, he would ever really know the identity of his penpal), but that didn’t keep Stan from wondering about who Lawrence really was. 

Stan tried to forget about it, about all of it. About Moose, about Moose having his emails, about all of it, but the way Moose eyed him in the halls when he and Bev passed by, it was hard to forget anything. 

Closer to Halloween, things got worse. Shit hit the fan _ harder _if you will. 

“I got invited to a party,” Bev told them around a mouthful of turkey, ranch and Dorito sandwich. 

“A party?” Stan asked, and she nodded, ranch dressing dripping from one of the corners of her mouth. 

“You got a little something there, Bevvy,” Richie said, and she slapped him on the bicep and reached across his lunch tray for his napkin. She wiped the ranch off and dropped the crumpled napkin back onto Richie’s lunch. 

“Yeah, a party,” she replied as Richie plucked the dirtied paper off of his food with only his index finger and his thumb. He jerked the napkin toward Eddie with a sudden noise, and Eddie recoiled in disgust.

“Richie, that’s disgusting,” Eddie complained, but Richie clutched his stomach, laughing so hard he nearly tumbled off his seat. Stan rolled his eyes, and Bev kept on about the party.

“This guy, Mike, he’s throwing a party at his dad’s farm. Bill told me all about it, and Ben from my Lit. class. They’ve both asked me to go, said I could invite anyone I wanted.” She donned a satisfied, triumphant smile. Stan marveled at how normal his friends could be while his whole life crumbled to pieces around him, it felt. 

“Mike’s totally cool. Mad good at soccer, too. He works for his dad on their farm, I think. I say we go. What’s the worst that could happen, eh Stanny?” No one spoke for a moment. A long, long moment. 

“So, party? Are we going, or…” Bev trailed off. “And by ‘we,’ I mean I’m going no matter what. The rest of you losers can either come or not come.” She looked pointedly to Richie, who shrugged.

“Yeah, I guess. Like I said, Mike’s pretty cool, and I’ve heard his parties are cool, too. What about you, Eds?” 

“Farms aren’t exactly…the cleanest,” he murmured, pulling a face at just the thought of the dirt and grime of the farm. “And parties aren’t my scene.” 

“Oh, come on!” Richie urged, waving his hands all around him. “There’ll be a whole lot of cute, little farm animals for you to pet!” 

“Fine,” Eddie relented, “but I want to see some cute ass animals, okay? Or else, I’m leaving.” Richie cheered, and Bev joined in, and Eddie tried to keep his smile down but failed. All three looked expectantly to him, and Stan coughed to avoid choking. He had only been half-listening for the whole conversation, too caught up in thinking about Tanner as his mystery penpal. 

“What?” Stan asked. 

“Are you coming with us?” Bev replied, eyebrow raising as if what she was saying was totally, completely obvious. Perhaps it was, just not to Stan. 

“I—yeah, I guess,” he muttered.

“So, what should we go as?” Bev started, and Richie practically exploded with ideas, chattering on and on, mostly to Eddie instead of Bev. 

“Have you heard what anyone else is going as?” 

“Greta is going as a rabbit, but we all know that just means she’ll wear some lingerie and a headband and call it a costume. I heard her talking to Bowers and his gang about it. Apparently, Henry’s going as Freddy Krueger, Moose is going as Spider-Man, Belch isn’t going at all, and I didn’t stick around for the others. I heard Ashely Hyde is going as a sheet ghost ‘cause she said she just wants the booze that’s sure to be there, and—” 

“You should go as Mary-Jane. From the Spider-Man comics,” Stan suggested. 

“What? But, Stan, we always go for Halloween in matching costumes!” 

“Bev, we’re seniors in high school. Next year, we’ll be in college, and we won’t go as anything for Halloween because we’ll be miles and miles away from each other and busy.”

“That’s all the more reason we should go together this year.” Bev looked hurt, and Stan’s stomach rolled with guilt. He plastered a smile on his cheeks and waved it off. She took that and jumped right back into listing costume ideas. 

“Eds and I are going as mustard and ketchup!” Richie declared. 

“We never agreed on that! You just said that’s what we should go as,” Eddie complained, but Richie flung an arm over Eddie’s shoulder and pulled him into his side. 

“Mustard and ketchup!” 

Stan, like Eddie, did not often attend parties. Sure, there was the party in eighth grade he attended with Richie, but that was more…childish than all the high school parties Richie and Bev talked about now. That party was spin-the-bottle-truth-or-dare (because most of them hadn’t had their first kiss, and Nikki and Emily Richards’ parents’ basement did not have quite the romantic atmosphere most girls dreamed their first kiss happen in) and a bowl of greasy potato chips on the coffee table with, at most, a few sodas in the mini-fridge. No alcohol, no couples dancing just a little too close, no too-loud music, none of the elements of a high school party, and Stan hadn’t even liked that party. Call him mundane, boring, or a plain old party-pooper, but he quite preferred his bedroom over parties. Stan had never had anything stronger than soda, much less alcohol, and he wasn’t quite sure how he would ever handle getting drunk.

From what Richie told him, Friday was his time to find out, and that fact, to say the least, terrified Stan. Drunk? In front of all of his classmates? Oh, Hell no. There was no way he was drinking at this party, he promised himself, not when there was so much he could say and do to embarrass himself. 

Oh, Hell no. He was not getting drunk. 

* * * * 

“Oh, Hell yes!” Stan muttered, voice loud and wavering in his own ears. His fingers fumbled for Bev’s sleeve, and he pulled her toward the rising and falling, jumping wave of half-drunk, half-high teenagers in the middle of the field. She laughed, but the sound drowned with every other voice beneath the pulsating music playing through big speakers placed just on the edge of the barn. 

For one night, Stan forgot about Moose, about the emails, about all of it. And shit, it felt good. Sure, he was drunk off his ass, can’t-think-can’t-walk-drunk-off-his-ass, but it was fun. It was fun, and he was free from Moose and the emails for the first time in weeks. 

Eddie and Richie did, in fact, show up as mustard and ketchup. Eddie sat with his back against a hay bale and a dog’s head in his lap. Richie sat on the hay bale, close enough that his knee grazed Eddie’s shoulder, and he waved his hands around as he talked to anyone who came up to him. The big, red rim of his ketchup cap moved around with his head. The sight made Stan giggle to himself. 

He and Bev went as clowns. She did their makeup in her bedroom, a dot of lipstick on his nose and a big, red smile painted on his cheeks. She looked the same except her smile was blue. 

True to Bev’s word, Greta showed up in some lacy, white ensemble with bunny ears and called it a costume, Moose showed up in a baggy, store-bought Spider-Man costume, and Ashley Hyde hid a bottle beneath the bedsheet she cut two holes in and was progressively drunker each time Stan crossed her path. 

Point was, Stan was having an absolute blast. He and Bev had their own little corner of the make-shift dance floor of hay and matted grass, and she kept putting these pink, fruity drinks in his hand. Being drunk—or, at least, half-drunk—was not as bad as he thought. He was pretty sure he hadn’t said anything embarrassing yet, but the night was still young. 

“I’ve got to piss!” he yelled over the pulsating music. Bev giggled, and Stan’s dulled mind tried to work out what was so funny. She turned and struck up a conversation with whoever was closest to them, and Stan stumbled away from the jumping crowd of costumed, drunken teenagers. 

Stan thought he loved the Hanlon Farm a little bit. The house sat on the edge of the woods. The windows glowed in the night, and the porch twinkled with little string lights. Figures moved across windows, and the clothes hung over the clothesline out back fluttered in the wind. Distantly, Stan smelled a pie of some sort, and a cow mooed somewhere in the field. Bugs chirped, and the air felt warmer, somehow, inside the fences of the farm than it did in town. Yes, Stan thought he loved the Hanlon Farm.

He stepped up the front walk, skipping on alternating feet up the stepping stones and chuckling at himself. Being drunk was better than okay—it was fun. The screen door crashed closed behind him, and Stan tilted on through the kitchen. He didn’t quite know where the Hell the bathroom was, not exactly, at least, but he figured he’d know when he came to one, so he started off opening doors. 

The last hallway he found himself in had three doors, two to his left and one on his right. He opened the first and found a dark room with a sewing machine on a table, and he closed it. The next room was not so empty as when he swung the door open, he found Mike Hanlon kneeling over a girl Stan didn’t bother to look at the face of. She shrieked. 

“Get out!” she yelled, and she threw her own balled up shirt toward Stan where he stood in the doorway. He stood, frozen, and he and Mike made brief eye contact before Stan came back to himself, suddenly a lot more sober than he was before he opened the door. Stan closed the door a touch too hard, sighed shakily, and bolted for the next room. Thankfully, it was a bathroom. 

Stan stood before the mirror for a long moment, staring at himself and his shaking hands. He plastered a smile on his face but dropped it with how fake it looked, even to him. He would need to remember to cross Mike off his list. That definitely did not look gay. 

He returned to Bev as soon as he could. She was still talking to the girl from before, from when he left, but she whirled around at his return and pulled the girl into their little group.

“How was your piss?” Bev asked, laughing again. He glanced over her shoulder and made eye contact with Moose but broke it immediately. 

“It was fine. I’d like to be a lot more drunk than I am, though.” This time, both Bev and the girl leaned back and laughed. 

“We can make that happen,” the girl told him, and she disappeared only to come back not a moment later with another red cup full of a brownish, disgusting smelling liquid. It looked similar to what he had seen Ashley Hyde hiding under her sheet, but he tipped his head back and gulped it down until his eyes watered and throat burned too much for him to drink the rest right away. 

“I’m Kay!” the girl told him, holding his hand out to shake after he wiped his mouth on the back of his own hand. 

“Stan.” 

“I’m Bev!” Now, all three of them giggled together. 

Bev and Kay both supplied him with drink after drink until he couldn’t stand right or walk straight or talk without stumbling over his words. The air was cool, and he was sure his makeup had long since wiped off (Bev’s had faded but wasn’t totally gone yet), and goosebumps raised across his arms. He leaned most of his weight against Bev.

“Richie!” She pulled Stan over toward the hay bale where Richie and Eddie still sat. Stan thumped down next to Eddie and rested his head on his shoulder. “Stan’s pretty drunk, and I’m cold. Will you take us home?” Richie swirled his own drink—a soda, Eddie assured—and nodded, standing. Eddie and Bev pulled Stan up by his elbows. 

The ride home was a blur of streetlights out the window and Eddie and Richie talking in the front seats while he and Bev sat in silence in the back. They pulled up outside his house, and Bev dragged him, once more, out of the car and up his front walk. He fumbled with his keys but jabbed it in and turned the knob. 

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs.Uris,” Bev greeted as she led him up the stairs to his room.

“Have fun?” 

“Oh, definitely.” They laughed, but Mr.Uris narrowed his eyes at Stan. He didn’t stop them, and she got Stan to his bedroom in one piece. 

“Was he wearing lipstick?” she heard Mr.Uris ask, his voice muffled by the distance between them. She held her breath and stared at the side of Stan’s face. His lips moved around silent words, and his head listed forward until his chin met his chest with a dull thump.

“He’s home before we asked him to be, and he didn’t do any drugs, so I don’t really care if he’s wearing lipstick or not,” Mrs.Uris answered, and they said nothing more. Bev let out the breath she was holding.

Stan, meanwhile, fell back on his bed and sighed. He wore a serene smile and closed his eyes. Bev sat down on the edge next to his shoulder, and she procured a makeup wipe from her purse. She dragged the wipe over his cheeks. 

“Thanks, Bevvy,” he whispered, and she smiled down at him. Before he even registered the door closing, she was gone, and he drifted off to sleep. 

He woke with a splitting headache and a cotton-y mouth, and he thought how terrible being drunk actually was. He spent the day in his room. At one point, he got out his list, and he crossed out Mike’s name with a heavy sigh, and that was that. 

But was that that? Stan’s chest ached, and his breaths were empty, somehow, hollow in his chest. He stared at the list, at the pencil rolling away from his hand on his desk, and the scribble over Mike’s name. It seemed wrong, ugly, over the two words. He slammed the notebook down on his desk, the sound of the cover hitting wood filling the room, and Stan stood from his desk chair only to fall back onto his bed. The legs squeaked against the floor, and he knew his mother would positively kill him if he scratched up the hardwood, but right now, he couldn’t give a smaller shit about the freaking flooring in his bedroom. 

Why did he care? Mike was cool, sure, but there was no way he was gay, not after that party, and he…Stan couldn’t say he didn’t fit most of the checks for his penpal. He hadn’t realized as such until now. 

The realization had Stan groaning again, throwing his hands over his face and dragging his fingers over his cheeks. Perhaps doing this was becoming a habit—“Your face’ll get stuck like that, Staniel,” he could practically hear Richie saying, which was almost equally concerning because he could hear Richie in his head far more than he would like to. 

Stan was spending too much time around Richie, he decided, but that was no help in finding a solution for his Mike problem. 

It was nothing to do with Mike himself, or anything he did, but Stan just thought…he wouldn’t have minded having Mike’s hand holding his or watching the sunset from the bed of his dad’s old farming truck, the one Stan heard Mike telling stories about at the party—

“When I was small,” he told the small group gathering around him as he sat on the top of a wooden picnic table, drink in hand, “he used to tell me, ‘Mike, spring is coming. You know what that means.’” And even Stan laughed where he stood, feet away from the edge of the crowd around Mike, at the way he deepened his voice to sound like Will Hanlon. “And I did! I knew! It meant we were gonna go into the barn and take the cover off the ol’ truck, and he was going to help me push it out from the barn but no farther. He’d jump into the driver’s seat, and we’d cruise until the engine turned over. I hated that chore, but Mom always had lemonade when we came back in, and sometimes, he’d let me drive after we got it started.” 

Stan, now, as he lay on top of his crumpled comforter, wondered what Mike would look like with the sun warming his skin through the front windshield, the wind messing up Stan’s hair because the window was open, and how Mike would look turning to him with a soft smile, how he—

_ Shut up, shut up, shut up _ . It was stupid to think like that, Stan knew. _ Stupid _. Mike was straight—entirely, unchangeably straight. He saw that last night, so why did this hurt so bad? He hardly knew Mike beyond what Richie had said about him and how Bev described him—apparently, they had some class or another together, and Stan never cared to ask about Mike. Why would he? It wasn’t like he liked him. Liking him would be pointless. 

Stan rolled over and grasped blindly for his notebook and a pencil. He came up with a blue gel pen, probably belonging to Bev or Eddie, but it would do. He opened the notebook, uncapped the pen, and he made a list to make him feel better. His hand faltered in flipping through the pages at the sight of the list of crossed-out names and question marks. He moved onto the next blank page. 

Why Mike Can’t be Lawrence

  1. Not gay. Lawrence is definitely gay. Mike is definitely not.

Stan couldn’t think of a second reason. He chewed the cap of the pen and stared down at the list, mocking him. He narrowed his eyes at the page, capped the pen, and closed the notebook again. Lists were supposed to make him feel better, so why didn’t he? He supposed it might have been because his mind wasn’t working as a list right now, all disorganized and jumbled thoughts, nothing neat about them. 

His head hurt. He needed a damn aspirin. 

* * * * 

Stan was no matchmaker. This fact seemed to irritate Moose more than anything else about Stan. he couldn’t for the life of him—and this quite possibly might have been life-or-death, socially, at least—get Bev to take a second look at Moose. Not that he blamed her since Moose still used hair gel like it was shampoo and water (what was this, the 1950’s?) and dressed like his mother, or, worse, his grandmother, still dressed him every morning. Which was to say, he dressed in polos stained with food and dirt and sweat and khakis and a suede jacket that had creases around his elbows from how much he wore the sleeves rolled up. Stan was sure he had never heard of face wash since Moose still had last Friday’s gravy stuck on the corner of his mouth, and his breath smelled worse than the creek out back of the Tracker Brothers’ baseball field. 

“What do you think about Moose?” Stan asked one day as little snowflakes fell outside the cafeteria windows, and he hoped he sounded casual because he sure as Hell didn’t feel casual. His insides were alight with nerves. He knew the answer from middle school, but he needed it to have changed or else his closet was about to get a whole lot more open to the public. 

“He’s an ass, why?” Bev chewed through her bite of salad and forked in another bite while Stan tried to figure out something better than “Just curious!” because that would never pass by her. She would narrow her eyes and stare him down until he unleashed his greatest secret onto her. 

“I heard him talking in, uh, gym, I think.” He didn’t have gym with Moose. Once again, he hoped she didn’t know that. “Wondered how you would have responded if he asked you out. He sounded pretty serious about it, you know. Just wondered what would happen if he was.” Stan shrugged, and Bev dropped her fork back onto her tray. Richie and Eddie were preoccupied, talking about something to do with a girl named Myra. Neither seemed to have much of anything nice to say about her. Stan had heard about her and didn’t blame them. 

“If he asks me out,” she started, “do you think a simple fist to the nose would suffice as a ‘Hell to the no,’ or should I go for the junk?” He chuckled nervously, but Bev’s face didn’t break from the stony expression she held. She was serious, and Stan knew better than anyone (he had seen her in action before) that she would make good on a promise like that. 

“Neither,” Stan squeaked. Moose hadn’t told him what would happen if Bev rejected his date since that, technically, wasn’t Stan’s fault—she had her own free will, man—but he was pretty sure him getting kicked in the groin would not bode well for his cause. 

No one knew about the fact Moose had his emails, not Bev, not Richie, not Eddie, not even Lawrence. It was better they didn’t know, Stan reasoned. Telling them would mean too much explaining, too many steps out from the dark, back corner of his closet. 

Yeah, he wasn’t about that.

He tried to slip Moose into his and Bev’s conversations all throughout winter. November turned into December, and he was free from Moose’s eyes meeting his in the hallways when he walked next to Bev for almost a month for winter break, and when school returned as normal, mid-terms served as an excuse, too, to avoid Moose like the plague. By the end of February, Bev had caught onto how often they talked about Moose, and Moose himself was getting antsy. 

“I’m thinking of doing something big,” Moose told him, swinging his feet forward and back, forward and back until his heels hit the underside of the desk he sat on. Mud flaked off the soles of his shoes, fluttering to the ground. Stan grimaced. 

“Yeah.”

“Tell her how I feel, you know.” 

“Yeah.” Moose seemed to be too braindead to realize Stan hadn’t said more than that single, monotone syllable since the conversation began. 

“You just need to make sure she’ll say yes. Or else, Stanny—or should I say Sullivan? Is that what you like going by, now?” 

“I get it, Moose,” Stan spat, finally looking up from his essay he was writing. Moose found him in the library at the beginning of the period and wouldn’t leave him alone. Stan was going to have to find a new place to hide out instead of going to lunch. That upset him the most; Moose’s threats were getting a little old, and a small, dark, cynical part of him hoped Moose would just out him already. It would be less work for him—he wouldn’t have to figure out an elaborate coming out on his own that way—but at the same time, a bigger part of him hoped Moose would never make good on releasing the emails. “She says anything other than ‘Oh, yes, Moose-y Goose-y, I love you!’ and you send out the emails. I get it, alright?” Moose narrowed his eyes. 

“I don’t appreciate your attitude.” 

“You’re going to have to learn to love it because I’m the only way you can get to her.” Moose scowled, and Stan stood and snapped the binder ring closed. “Leave me alone, Moose.” With that, he left the library, storming down the hall and not bothering to apologize when the big, wood-and-glass library doors slammed closed behind him. 

Looking back on things, Stan saw this story had a theme. Not a moral, per se, but more of a repeated, recurring idea. The theme in his story was the fact that shit kept hitting the fan harder. Things kept getting worse and worse as the seasons changed. 

This time, shit hitting the fan came at a soccer game a few weeks after his conversation with Moose in the library. It was the first home game of the season, and Richie was insisting Stan, Eddie, and Bev came to watch him “kick ass as the goalie.” 

Moose insisted they come, too. Not so much Eddie—he didn’t have much interest in Eddie, if any, at least not since Sonia Kaspbrak chewed him out—but Bev and Stan. 

“Something big is gonna happen, Stan,” Moose sung, “and you’re gonna wanna be there.”

So they went. Stan didn’t have enough time to think up a good enough excuse, one that would pass by both Richie and Moose, so they went, and Stan felt like throwing up the whole time. Each bump beneath the wheels of Richie’s truck had him closing his eyes and holding his stomach and leaning his sweaty forehead on the cool window. It was a wonder no one noticed. 

“Who’re we playing, anyway?” Eddie asked across the middle console, and Richie spared him a glance before returning his eyes to the road. Contrary to what Stan liked to think, Richie was a decent (okay, he was really pretty okay) driver when he wasn’t being a dumbass. 

“Come on, Eds! It’s only the biggest game we’ve had since the beginning of the season!” 

“Rich, you guys have played, what? Three games before this one?” Richie rolled his eyes but held his grin. 

“Enley High. That’s who we’re playing.” 

“Are they any good?” 

“Little better than us, but we’ve been kicking ass this year already, so I think we’ll win.” Richie shrugged, and Stan felt even sicker. How could they not feel the same impending doom he did? It was crushing him, but they were laughing and talking and smiling like nothing was wrong when, in fact, everything was wrong.

Richie left them in the parking lot, jogging off to changed into his jersey and his padding and gear. The sun glowed above the field, and the chain-link fence around the bleachers cast long, skinny shadows over the sidewalk. Any other day, Stan might be smiling and laughing with Eddie and Bev as they shoved each other and joked. Today, his eyes found the shiny, gel-ed mound of hair on Moose’s head, and his stomach dropped.

What the Hell did something big even mean? Was he going to drop his end of the deal? Out Stan before he even asked Bev out? What the whole Bev thing a ruse, a lie to give Stan some hope that his secret would stay mostly a secret? Stan’s stomach rolled again. Moose’s head turned like he could feel Stan’s eyes on his head, and their eyes met. Moose grinned. 

Stan couldn’t take his focus away from Moose for the whole first half of the game. Forty-five minutes of rolling, rumbling anxiety and watching Moose’s head bob as he talked to his asshole friends—Henry Bowers, Belch, Vic, and a few others who Stan only recognized from the times they stood over him while Bowers terrorized him and his friends. 

They were winning. The crowd was cheering, and Bev, Eddie, and Stan sat close to the front of the bleachers, almost as close to the field as they could get. Each time Richie blocked a ball, Bev and Eddie stood and whooped, and Moose glared back at Stan, flitting his eyes to Bev and back to Stan again. 

The fifteen-minute break between halves of the game came, and Stan stuttered out a half-baked lie about needing to get something to drink, and he stumbled out of the bleachers. Stan found himself leaning his head back on the wall next to the bathroom door. His breathed hard, chest heaving, and jerked to look more casual when the door swung open. He stood in front of the sink and stared at the mirror for a long, long moment, noting how pale and waxy he looked under the fluorescent lights, how his hands shook. 

The crowd outside cheered, and Stan whipped toward the door. The game hadn’t begun again—it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. He pushed past a man coming into the bathroom and half sprinted back toward the gate to the bleachers, skidding to a stop when he saw Moose in the middle of the field in front of the seats. Bowers was practically red from holding in his laughter, but Moose ignored him and spoke into the microphone in his hand. In his other hand, he held a sign Stan couldn’t read from where he stood, but he practically already knew what it said. 

“Beverly Marsh,” Moose boomed, and Stan could have cried, “will you go to Prom with me? Dinner, too.” Moose sounded hopeful, but each and every conversation he had ever had with Bev about Moose flitted through his mind in small snippets, and he knew. Stan knew. 

He prayed Bev would see him, his reaction, and take pity on him, but at the same time, he knew he was too far away, and he wasn’t about to go onto the field next to Moose. 

Bev stood in the bleachers, her red hair looking all the fierier under the lights of the field that hit the seats. No one breathed, not even Stan. 

“Hell to the no.” The bleachers exploded into laughter, and Bev sat back down with a satisfied smirk. Moose spluttered and, in an instant, he turned around and glared daggers at Stan. 

Stan knew. He turned on his heel and ran in the other direction. The only sound in his ears were his huffing, stuttering breaths and the soles of his shoes slapping against the concrete sidewalks, and the distant cheers of the game starting again. Stan slowed and typed out a message to Eddie and Bev with shaking fingers. 

‘had to go home. didn’t feel great. sorry.’ 

No one replied until he got home.

‘Did you see Moose fghjkl it was a MESS it was so fucking funny.’

‘I can assure you a simple oh hell to the no did the job just fine’

‘BEV ASDFDFFGDG’

He read Eddie’s and Bev’s messages, muted his phone, and dropped it back onto his bed. He curled up on his side, gripping a pillow, and he cried. He didn’t bother to be quiet, not now. He sobbed. Tears wet his cheeks and his sheets and the pillow. 

“Stan?” Andrea murmured, knocking a knuckle against his door. “Stan, are you okay?” 

“Mom,” he wept, and the door opened. Andrea sat on the end of his bed, and he pulled him closer like she used to when he was small. His head rested in her lap, and her fingers twirled one of his curls. He cried until his throat burned until his chest ached until he was too tired to cry any more. 

“What happened, babe?” she asked. Stan drew in a wavering breath and closed his eyes. 

“I’m scared.” 

“You know your father and I are always here. We love you—no matter what, Stan. That’ll never change, no matter what.” 

“I—I…” Stan took another deep breath and sat up to face her. The pillow fell away from him, and he wiped his face with the heel of his hand. Stan sniffled. “I’m gay.” Andrea paused, and Stan knew it was over. She hated him, now, she’d kick him out, she’d—

“I know. It’s okay, though. It’s okay.” Andrea pulled him into her side, and he dissolved into broken, gasping cries again. 

“I’m scared,” he repeated. She squeezed him harder. They stayed like that until he fell asleep. 

Stan woke with puffy, burning eyes. He stared at the white of his ceiling before rolling off and tumbling into his desk chair. He opened his laptop, and, despite knowing what he would find before he even opened his eyes, his stomach dropped. 

_ Dear everybody, _

_ I see everyone talking about Moose at last night’s game. A few of you even took it upon yourself to take videos of him without his knowledge and post them both on _ DerryBlog _ and _ YouTube _ . How kind of you. I actually think what he did was brave and charming. If I was Beverly, I would’ve said yes, but I’m definitely not Beverly. _

_ Anyway, I’d like to do the brave thing and take the focus away from Moose. So, here I am. _

_ Stanley Uris is gay. Yes, you read that right, but feel free to read it about three more times until it sets in. Stanley Uris is gay. That kid who sat next to you in freshman English or in September’s Anti-Bullying assembly is gay. Below, I have proof. He and his gay little penpal have been talking about how gay they are for the past school year. Who knows how many of us he’s ogled in the locker room or crushed on without our knowledge. I think that’s more important than what Moose did. _

_ Sincerely, _

_ Anonymous _

Stan held his head in his hands. He dragged his eyes over the comments, most of them the same as they were on Lawrence’s post. 

_ Bowers-Coolest-69 _: is this real? HAHA. he deserved all the beatings I gave him, then. 

_ gretagretagreta _: see! NO ONE IS STRAIGHT ANYMORE. 

_ Rich-The-Man _: Greta, I’m not afraid to sick Bev on you. Now, I wouldn’t hit a girl, but she sure as Hell would, so just stop. Shut up.

Stan read Richie’s comment, and his blood turned to ice in his veins. His eyes snapped to the inbox icon in the lower corner of the screen. There was a white number six inside a little, blue circle. He clicked the box and held his breath. 

_ b.marsh.ev _: are you okay?

_ b.marsh.ev _: i’m here if you nee…

_ Rich-The-Man _: bev said u aren’t re…

_ Rich-The-Man _: were worried about u Sta…

_ Rich-The-Man _: come on, r u ok? 

_ Eds-ed-eddie _: talk to us, please. 

Stan didn’t reply to any of them. He curled up on his chair and rested his forehead on his knees and tried to figure out what to do. He sorted through his messy, tumbling thoughts. He didn’t think he could cry again. He didn’t want to cry again. 

The page refreshed, and a colorful poster appeared. 

_ Derry’s Annual Fair! Come, enjoy a night free of worries! Eat wonderful food, ride rides, etc.! Tickets are $5 for adults, $3 for seniors and students. Open Friday, April 14 - Sunday, April 16. _

Stan’s mind cleared at the sight of the poster, save for one thought. I know what to do. Was it stupid? Incredibly so. But he did it anyway. Stan opened a new post. 

_ Dear students of Derry High, _

_ That post wasn’t lying. I’m gay. I’m homosexual. I like boys, and I’d also like to address some of the things that person said about me. I don’t ogle you in the locker rooms. I don’t have a crush on every boy I see, and I honestly don’t remember who I sat next to in freshman year English class. _

_ About the emails. I don’t know who it is I’m talking to. I don’t know his real name, and he didn’t know mine until today. I don’t know if I’ll ever know who he is because I doubt he’ll ever talk to me again. I’m scared. I’m so scared, but I’m not going to hide. I won’t let myself hide. Why should I be ashamed? _

_ The Derry Annual Fair is coming to town at the end of this week. I’ll be there on Friday. Feel free to come and ridicule me, call me names, but I am going to be on the Ferris Wheel for the whole night. Lawrence, if you’re reading this, I’m done being scared. If you want to join me, I’ll be exactly where I said I would be. If not, I don’t blame you. _

_ I may not know your real name or what you look like, but I know you. And you know me. For a while, you knew me better than anyone else knew me. Like I said in the beginning, I’m just like you. _

_ Love, _

_ Stan _

Stan hit the post button, and the post disappeared from his screen. There was no crescendo of powerful music, no feeling of triumph, and his nerves didn’t dissolve. If anything, they increased by tenfold. He closed his computer. 

_Friday_. 

Stan leaned back in his chair and ran his hands over his face with a sigh. This sucked. 

Andrea let him stay home for the two days between then and Friday, which he thanked her for, but his father insisted he couldn’t stay home for the rest of the year, so they agreed on sending him back to school on Monday. 

Friday came and so did the fair. Stan sat in the hay-lined parking lot for a long, long time. He stared up at the lights on the rides as the sun set, and took in a deep breath. He stood from his car and walked through the fair without sparing a glance at anyone around him. He heard whispers grow louder around him, growing like fire all around him. He paid them as little mind as he could for himself to. 

The man running the Ferris Wheel let him on and started the ride. Staring down at the fair from so far above made Stan all the more anxious. He could feel that Lawrence wouldn’t come, that he’d go to school on Monday all alone, friendless and open to a beating from Bowers. And what could he do to stop it? Nothing. 

The wheel took him back down to the ground, and he found a crowd had begun to form around the queue fence. Bev stood at the front, and she waved at him, jumping up and down and smiling like she hadn’t just found out he had lied to her for as long as they’d known each other. He waved back. No one stood in line, and Stan’s small smile dropped. How long would he wait for? The whole night? How many people would witness his entire life crumble? The whole school, probably. 

Up and down, up and down, three more times until the crowd had grown exponentially, and Stan felt like doing nothing more than going home and crying, accepting the fact he’d never know who Lawrence was. 

“Another go, kid?” 

“Yeah, one more,” Stan sighed. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Bev where she gave him a sad look from the sidelines, so he stared down at his hands and fiddled with his fingers. 

“Wait!” 

Stan’s head shot up so fast his brain rattled in his skull but there, at the beginning of the line with his hand held out and mouth opened around a yell, was Mike Hanlon. The one and only Mike Hanlon, the one Stan caught with a girl at his party and went home and crossed his name off his list. All the air in Stan’s lungs whooshed out past his lips. Mike’s eyes met his. 

“It’s you,” Stan murmured. 

“Yeah,” Mike whispered, voice slightly lost to the deep breaths he was taking. “It’s me.”

Stan’s breath caught in his throat as Mike stepped forward. His eyes caught Bev’s, and she shot him two thumbs-up. He smiled down at his lap. Mike lowered himself into the seat next to him. 

“I said you didn’t have to come.”

“I know,” Mike said, voice just slightly louder than before. “I wanted to.”

They stared at each other for a long moment, both flushed with a deep blush. Stan’s fingers twitched in his lap, practically itching to reach down and take Mike’s hand in his own. He sucked in a shaky breath as the Ferris Wheel rattled to a start.

“I made a list,” he blurted, and Mike furrowed his brows at him. Stan paused a moment before elaborating. “For who it—_ you _—could be. For who you couldn’t be. For all the reasons why you, Mike Hanlon, couldn’t be Lawrence. That one was the shortest list.”

“Oh? What was on that one?” The corner of Mike’s mouth quirked up in an amused smile, and Stan flushed even more, which he previously thought was impossible.

“Just that you couldn’t possibly be gay,” Stan said. Mike threw his head back and laughed.

Mike shook his head with a grin, and Stan found himself smiling, too, “There’s no way I’m gay. No way.” 

“I added it after the party,” Stan told him, and the smile slid slowly from Mike’s face. Stan dragged his gaze back down to his lap, and he fiddled with his fingers. “I don’t get it. Is this a joke? Is it you, really you? That party, I just…” Stan trailed off. 

“Yeah, that. I don’t know. I was just confused and drunk I think? Trying to get you out of my head. You were like this mystery kid who might not even exist and I was trying to run away, I guess.” 

“I woke up with the worst headache of my life the next morning,” Stan admitted. “That was the only time in my life I’ve ever been drunk, let alone that drunk. I was just trying to forget what I saw.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Stan saw Mike staring at him. The ride rattled some more, stopping and starting so each carriage paused, at least for a moment or two, at the topmost point. Finally, their carriage took its turn above the fair. From here, Stan could see the crowd had grown even more, and the sun was sinking to a sliver over the horizon, casting a glow over Mike’s face. 

“I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you. I was scared.”

“I’m scared, too.” Stan laughed humorlessly. He turned to Mike. “Can I kiss you?”

Mike smiled, and Stan swallowed hard, “Yeah, you can.”

More than a little awkwardly, Stan pressed forward, pushing his lips to Mike’s. He kept his hands on his lap and leaned over most of the seat until Mike scooted closer and took Stan’s hands into his own. Below them, the crowd cheered deafeningly—Bev loudest of them all, followed closely by Eddie and Richie. Stan broke the kiss to laugh, resting his forehead against Mike’s. Both of them breathed hard.

“I like you, Stan,” Mike murmured, smiling against his lips. “This is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but I know you’re worth it.”

Was it a little stupid? Yeah, maybe. But, shit, Stan was one lucky son of a bitch. 


End file.
